Woodworm

April 1, 2024
"In this house you don't inherit money or gold rings or monogrammed sheet sets; beds and bad blood are all the dead pass down," observes a granddaughter. Escape, too, is impossible, entrapping generation after generation. "In this house the dead live for too long and the living not long enough." Originally built by a philandering manipulator to imprison his wife--the last among his abuse victims--the "restless" house is also inhabited by angels ("they're more like giant insects") and saints (one who "burned the sheets with her halo"). For now, the spectral share the walls with a grandmother and granddaughter; buried within are accursed secrets. When the granddaughter is accused of murder, it is the house that delivers the final verdict. Spanish author Mart�nez's fiction debut, succinctly co-translated by award-winning Hughes and McDermott, draws on her maternal grandmother's stories of surviving Franco's Spanish Civil War. Here, Mart�nez deftly alchemizes male entitlement, class privilege, and casual violence into damnable attributes: "Revenge is important because it is the only way for the protagonists to get justice," she adds.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2024
Two women, a grandmother and her granddaughter, grapple with their legacy in a house forged from hate. The troubling fact that all houses are haunted isn't lost on Spanish author Mart�nez, who infuses the bewitched homestead in her little nightmare with saints and angels to balance out its familial terrors. "We have a lot of traditions, including locking each other away," confesses the unnamed granddaughter, who co-narrates the story in alternating chapters with her equally anonymous grandmother. Set against the backdrop of La Mancha--a region that bore the brunt of the country's civil war--the story unfolds in a very old house where the girl still dreams of escape to university in Madrid, or any kind of better life really, but her elder knows better: "It's a trap. Nobody ever leaves it, and those who do always end up coming back." We soon learn that the grandmother's own mother buried her abusive husband alive within the walls of the house, which seems to have awakened a hunger in it. Crippled by poverty, the narrators are also burdened by their parasitic relationship with the Jarabos, a wealthy family that suffers under the curses the grandmother and her saints unfurl upon them, and that waits, if subconsciously, for their comeuppance. The grandmother's marriage to the Jarabos' foreman, Pedro, ended with his mysterious demise, and the granddaughter's employment under their roof only deepens the familial rift. If the book's stubborn employment of unnamed characters seems confusing, it is. Mart�nez's prose is fairly straightforward with a menacing snarl hiding amid all this subtext, but it often leaves one guessing as to what's happening at all. There are interesting dynamics simmering underneath, not least the palpable sense of inherited trauma and the oppressive nature of inequality. However, the book's metaphysical ambitions are compromised by structural flaws that threaten to leave readers adrift, if alarmed. A ghost story buried in a family closet laden with skeletons and sins.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2024
Martinez debuts with a sophisticated ghost story about a former nanny suspected of involvement in a child’s disappearance. The unnamed young woman has just been detained because of her suspected connection to the mysterious disappearance of her wealthy employer’s son, Guillermo Jarabo. After her release for lack of evidence, she moves back in with her grandmother, her only surviving relative, in the house she grew up in somewhere near Madrid. Ostracized by the villagers and scrutinized by journalists, the women spend their days confined to their dilapidated house, which has long been haunted by ghosts who exasperate them with constant muttering. The spirits are woven into their family’s legacy: the house was purchased by the grandmother’s physically abusive father, whose wife later killed him at the ghosts’ urging, an act that instilled in her the family’s “woodworm itch” to do rotten things (for her part, the grandmother believes her granddaughter intentionally let Guillermo wander off). As the narrative alternates between the perspectives of the granddaughter and grandmother, Martinez reveals how Guillermo’s disappearance connects to the women’s long struggle against poverty and their family’s contentious relationship with the Jarabos. Martinez breathes new life into the classic haunted house motif through her vivid exploration of generational trauma, violence, misogyny, and class. Readers won’t soon forget this striking tale.